A testimonial from Harvard talk on Friday

An attendee, David, at Friday's talk at Harvard with GiveGetWin, spoke to me for a while before the event began and then after. He wrote the following Joshua’s talk at Harvard was wonderful. He masterfully dissected the process of decision-making and the influence it has on people’s lives. In less than 15 minutes he left me with enough to think about for a week. After the event we ended up speaking more and Joshua’s knowledge of etymology and his precise and knowledgeable demeanor blew me away. I couldn't help sharing it. The audience asked lots of questions and shared personal…

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How meditation helps

Interruptions distract you from your thoughts. How often you get interrupted determines how complex and developed your thoughts can be. If someone interrupts you every five seconds it's hard to think thoughts that take more than five minutes to develop. Someone interrupting you every ten minutes would let you develop more complex, longer-term thoughts. If you can only think short-term, you can only see short-term trends in your life, you can only address simple problems, and you can only see things superficially. You react more than you lead. Short-term thinking limits your ability to make sense of life, to plan…

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See Joshua Spodek at Harvard today!

Monday I spoke at NYU-Stern with a group called GiveGetWin on Leadership and Entrepreneurship. Judging by the number of attendees who asked questions and went out for drinks with us after, the event went great and they invited me to speak at Harvard today. Sorry for the last-minute notice, but I wasn't sure I could make it work in my schedule. The details are that I'll talk about leadership and entrepreneurship along with a few other speakers involved in GiveGetWin's tour. We'll speak at the Harvard Science Center starting at 6:30pm in Auditorium D. If you're around Boston or Cambridge,…

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How to Choose

Most of your identity is the culmination of the choices you've made. You choose all day every day. Many people have trouble making big choices, for some choosing is even debilitating. If you do, you're holding yourself back from living your life more fully. I used to dwell on decisions too. In my second year of business school I saw many of my classmates dwelling on choices between different job offers, unable to choose between Goldman and McKinsey. While most of the world would imagine it simple to choose among six-figure offers from prestigious firms, people choose for their reasons,…

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Motivating Rejections — The Series

I've learned to view what many people call failure as experience and lack of failure as not experimenting enough. If you avoid failure absolutely, I would guess I would sound annoying to me. Not that I'm special in this way. The entrepreneurial community celebrates failure, at least among those who learn from it despite the pain. So do sports and plenty of other places. A major part of my failures come in the form of rejections. Like many of my failures that turned into great learning experiences that led to great successes, many rejections renewed passions in me to succeed…

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Emotional skills versus emotional intelligence

Who hasn't heard about the value of emotional intelligence? Everybody talks about how mere regular intelligence only gets you so far before you hit limits. It makes sense. Emotions affect your relationships and for projects bigger than you can finish alone, which means nearly everything, you need to use relationships. Deeper than how well you lead others, emotions help you understand yourself, so understanding emotions helps you improve your life too. As much value as emotional intelligence has, I feel the concept misses something important. The more I learn about and coach people on emotions, the more value I see…

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Instead of connecting to a higher purpose, try a more personal purpose

You've heard the advice that to inspire and motivate people, it helps to connect their task to a higher purpose, right? It seems to make sense. Martin Luther King motivated people to painful and degrading but effective tasks with calls to justice based on concepts of freedom and religion. Patton motivated people to risk their lives with appeals to saving the country. What if you have a team without such lofty goals? You probably aren't leading people to free people from oppression or save your country from Nazis. How do higher purposes help when you want the five people who…

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The Origins of “How to Lead People So They Want You to Lead Them Again”

When you think about influencing or motivating someone in business, what tools do you think of using? How do you think of motivating people? Did you think of incentive-based tools based in authority, like bonuses, promotions, raises, increasing or decreasing someone's responsibilities, threat of firing, threat of demotion, and the like? In my experience, most people do. Why not? We're used to seeing them used. They work fairly predictably---almost nobody prefers no raise to a raise. We're used to experiencing others use on them on us. We can easily see them used and measure their effects. These tools fail you…

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Overcoming Objections and Blocks — The Series

Do you know you want to improve something about your life but never seem able to? Do you find yourself always trying to understand your problems but never overcoming them? Or just saying you're just this way and can't do anything about it, even though you know other people who were like you learned to get past it? You probably have internal objections and blocks stopping you. External hurdles are much easier to overcome. Some people never learn to overcome internal ones. Read my series on some common objections and blocks, "Overcoming Objections and Blocks -- The Series," and how…

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My Q&A with a Nobel Prize winner

Following up yesterday's post on Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz's talk and my Q&A with him... He spoke on leadership and ethics. I felt honored and flattered for him to describe my question as "A great question, really the core question." He spoke mainly about the many corporate decisions business and political leaders made that hurt many people and the systems that enabled them, as well as the beliefs and assumptions that also enabled them. For the decisions, think of the predatory lending leading to the recent great recession, schemes pharmaceutical companies made to make creating generic drugs impossible, BP…

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The value of entrepreneurial skills for artists and vice versa

Pyragraph Magazine just published a piece I wrote, "The Value of Entrepreneurial Skills for Artists," on how I hustled (a term that for me in entrepreneurship means only positive things) my way into a prestigious teaching gig at NYU while creating a big public art work. I loved and benefited from each. Neither opportunity could stand on its own, but both together worked. And the city, the school, and the students benefited. You don't have to make art to see how you can apply the story to your life. Check out the story.

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See Joshua Spodek on a distinguished panel on Entrepreneurship and Leadership at NYU March 27

I've been invited to participate on a panel with several distinguished entrepreneurs and leaders at NYU March 27 6pm-7:30pm. Click here for the announcement and to register (the event is free, but you have to register). Below is the text. NYU Entrepreneurs Network & NYU Leadership Development Initiative present Entrepreneurship VS Leadership Similarities, Differences, & Lessons Learned We often talk about leadership and entrepreneurship as if they were the same thing. Have you wondered what is the relationship between these two fields? How transferable are the skills and capacities that might be required for each? What role does entrepreneurship play…

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How managing your manager helps your relationship with your spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend

  • Post category:Leadership

Look at my post from two weeks ago on how to manage your manager and you'll notice something beyond business relationships. Much of what works for managing managers applies to asserting yourself and improving personal, even intimate, relationships. I distinguish there between how people usually manage people and how they manage their managers. People usually manage people with external incentives---bonuses, offers of promotions, threats of demotion or firing, increases or decreases of responsibility, titles, and so on... what we often call carrots and sticks. External incentives make sense. They produce measurable predictable results for everyone. We're used to people managing…

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Inquiry-driven project-based learning rocks!

If you lead, coach, or mentor, knowing effective teaching methods help you. People have been learning to teach for thousands of years, so we stand to learn from them. I recently attended a phenomenal conference on education called EduCon in Philadelphia, co-hosted by longtime friend Chris Lehmann, who founded The Science Leadership Academy, which ranks as one of the most inspirational educational communities I've participated in, including several Ivy-League universities. I had the chance to get a crash course in "inquiry-driven project-based learning," a style of teaching that focuses on students first, recognizes testing often comes at the cost of…

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“How to Lead People So They Want You to Lead Them Again” — My March 15 Leadership Seminar in NYC

Because January's seminar sold out and people reviewed it so positively, we're repeating it on March 15. And it includes a copy of my book with admission. Want to motivate people more effectively? Come to my March 15 seminar, “How to Lead People So They Want You to Lead Them Again,” which will be held at NYU-Stern, conveniently located in Greenwich Village. Past attendees of this seminar rated it very highly. Here is the text from the Columbia Business School Alumni Club announcement: Effective leaders motivate people from the inside---so people they lead contribute fully and thank the leader for…

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What you can learn from a film director

The reason we on the Distinguished Leaders Committee of Columbia Business School's alumni club booked a director for this evening's talk was something one of last year's speakers, Rita McGrath, said. If you're near New York City, I recommend you come (click here for details of location and how to sign up, you don't have to have graduated from Columbia to join). She pointed out that as people work at companies for shorter times, their personal networks that they maintain become more important. That is, someone you hire in their twenties today may not have worked at any company for…

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The connection between physics and self-awareness and emotions

People often ask me if I use my physics education today. As I see it, whereas physical sciences aim to make the world a materially better place, by studying and sharing what I learn about self-awareness and emotions I aim to make the world an emotionally better place. To me, physics is the study of the most fundamental parts of nature---time, distance, gravity, charge, mass, and so on. It also includes the human side of observing, honestly sharing results, and accepting improvements to past work, which I consider essential parts of science. People study nature for different reasons, some personal,…

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I’d rather know the subway train was ten stops away than not know where it is when it’s closer

Today's post is on a management practice of keeping people apprised of information that matters to them. I think it speaks for itself, but I'll illustrate its meaning by describing why it's on my mind. I'd rather know the subway train was ten stops away than not know where it is when it's closer. I'm working on a project with a manager who has to deal with some messy bureaucracy that makes knowing important things about the project difficult to forecast. As best I can tell, he sees those challenges as work only he can do, or maybe that he…

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Overcoming childhood anxieties and fears: nerd and geek are just elements of your style

I don't know about you, but a lot of people see me as nerdy and geeky. Growing up, the labels intimidated and debilitated me. Athletes seemed to get more attention and respect. I associated doing well in science and math with being made fun of. Since I did well in those subjects I hid my ability and didn't make a show of it. When I started college I took a couple science classes, but mostly chose humanities. I felt like a lot of people avoided science and math because they were socially less acceptable. It seemed like a lot of…

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My boss sucks. How do I manage my manager?

How to up-lead After my leadership seminars, someone always says "This material is great. I can see how it will improve my life. I'm starting to implement it. But you know who could really use it? My boss!" Most of my clients who have problems at work wish they could change their bosses, a process I call up-leading or up-managing. Come to think of it, our success developing up-leading skills seems a major reason people work with me. It seems a big and common need. A few changes in beliefs and learning a few new skills overcomes most of the…

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Context, Action, Result (CAR): answering interview questions and describing experience effectively

[This post is part of a series on Communication Skills Exercises for Business and Life. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Has an interviewer ever begun a question with "Can you tell me a time when ..." or asked you about your experience? Such questions arise in job interviews, with people considering promoting you, when seeking funding, even dating, to mention a few places. I'll take a lot of the guesswork out of how to answer. Your answer has…

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“You don’t understand me so I’m leaving you” happens in business relationships too

When you try to lead someone who doesn't feel understood you ruin your your chances of leading them. I want to emphasize in this post the difference between understanding someone and them feeling understood. You understanding someone happens in your head. Them feeling understood happens in their head. People don't act on what's in your head. They act on what's in their heads. Here's what trying to lead someone without them feeling understood is like. Imagine you walked into a store and before you told anyone what you wanted, a salesperson walked up to you and said "I know what…

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How to make someone feel understood: the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle

[This post is part of a series on Communication Skills Exercises for Business and Life. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Making someone feel understood is a powerful leadership tool that makes the difference between motivating with external incentives, which merely guide, and internal emotions, which motivate from within. With practice you'll be able to evoke passions and inspire. They'll often feel gratitude toward you for the inspiration, even as they contribute more than usual. You'll be surprised at…

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Talk to a misbehaving boss like you talk to a misbehaving child

One of my clients has a boss who hoards information and responsibility and doesn't give him the support he needs to do his job. Naturally, he wants to influence his boss to lead him better---that is, he wants to lead his boss. You have to see people as people first and positions on organization charts second, take responsibility, and lead them if you want to influence them. The first step I advise in leading anyone is awareness---in this case, understanding the motivations of the person you want to lead. If you don't understand their motivations, you'll have a hard time…

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The understanding handshake: skipping it undermines your ability to lead

Has anyone ever told you they understood you and then did something that someone who understood you never would? You feel they not only don't understand you, they think they did, which they don't, and told you they did, which was wrong. You write off that person as not understanding you and therefore not worth listening to or following. You might not even consider them worth your time to help them understand you. What's the point if they think they do when they don't? You could easily waste a lot of time with someone like that and get nowhere. Now…

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